swift, difficult passage. Sometimes he read to her, and sometimes he dictated to her, calling her in to his bedroom, like Churchill with his secretaries, at one o'clock in the morning. The novel moved fast, and in May, 1978, he asked her to come into his room, at twelve-thirty at night, and "spoke the end of the book It took an hour to an hour and a hal[" "A , Bend in the River" is narrated by Salim, a Muslim Indian merchant who has moved to a trading town, on the bend of a great river, in a newly indepen- dent African country. In 1966, Naipaul had spent time in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania, and in 1975 he travelled to Mobutu's Zaire. In Kisangani, he en- countered a young Indian businessman, whose deracination was striking. The es- sence of his novel, he said, is: 'What is this man doing here?" Like so many of Nai- paul's characters, Salim feels his status to be precarious: "I was also worried for us. Because, so far as power went, there was no difference between the Arabs and our- selves. We were both small groups living under a European flag at the edge of the continent." An old friend of Salim's, named Indar, who has been educated at a British university, arrives to lecture at the town polytechnic. Indar tells Salim about his journey to England, and once again N aipaul returns to the two beguilingly traumatic stories he has never escaped- the abbreviated, short story of his father's journey, and the arpeggiated, long story of his own journey. (Indar "will be me," he told Pat.) 'When we land at a place like London Airport we are concerned only not to ap- pear foolish," Indar says to Salim. Mer university, Indar tries to get a job with the Indian diplomatic service, but is humili- ated at the Indian High Commission in London. The officials there seem to him cringing, minor pomposities, yet one of them is bold enough to ask Indar how he could possibly represent India when he came from Africa: "How can we have a man of divided loyalties?" Indar tells Salim, "For the first time in my life I was filled with a colonial rage. And this wasn't only a rage with London or England; it was also a rage with the people who had allowed themselves to be corralled into a foreign fantasy." He decides, in London, that he will be aN aipauline empire of one. He realizes that he is homeless, that he 80 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER I, 2008 cannot go home, that he must stay in a place like London, that "I belonged to myself alone." Yet he consoles himself: "I'm a lucky man. I carry the world within me. You see, Salim, in this world beggars are the only people who can be choosers. Everyone else has his side chosen for him. I can choose. . . . But now I want to win and win and win." Yet, near the end of the book, Salim hears that Indar has not exactly won and won and won. He lost his academic gig when the Americans pulled the funding. Now "he does the lowest kind of job. He knows he is equipped for better things, but he doesn't want to do them. . . . He doesn't want to risk anything again." The N aipaul who wrote Indar's incan- descent monologue is the Naipaul who, many years earlier, had written this fierce letter to Pat: Put yourself in my place for a minute. . . If my father had 1/20 of the opportunity laid before the good people of British stock, he would not have died a broken, frustrated man without any achievement. But, like me, he had the opportunity-to starve. He was ghet- toed-in a sense more cruel than that in which Hitler ghettoed the Jews. But there was an element of rude honesty in the Nazi ap- proach; and they at any rate killed swiftly. The approach of the Free World is infinitely sub- tler and more refined. You cannot say to a foreign country: I suffer from political perse- cution. That wouldn't be true. . . But I suffer from something worse, an insidious spiritual persecution. These people want to break my spirit. They want me to forget my dignity as a human being. They want me to know my place. N aipaul in this letter resembles no writer so much as Frantz Fanon, the radical an- alyst of the "insidious spiritual persecu- tion" wrought by colonialism on the col- onized. The colonized subject, Fanon writes in "The Wretched of the Earth" (1961), "is constantly on his guard: con- fused by the myriad signs of the colonial world, he never knows whether he is out of line. Confronted with a world configured by the colonizer, the colonized subject is always presumed guilty. The colonized does not accept his guilt, but rather considers it a kind of curse, a sword ofDamocles." Fanon believed in violent revolution, but Naipaul's radical pessi- mism meets F anon's radical optimism at that point where the cut of colonial guilt, angrily resisted by both men, is converted into the wound of colonial shame-"a kind of curse." Fanon had argued, "The colonist is an exhibitionist. His safety con- cerns lead him to remind the colonized out loud: 'Here I am the master.' The col- onist keeps the colonized in a state of rage, which he prevents from boiling over." And the title novella of "In a Free Statè' is practically a working demonstration- spare, bleak, and burning-of that argu- ment. Bobby and Linda, a white English- man and woman, are driving though an Mrican country resembling Uganda. The man is an administrative officer in a gov- ernment department. In the course of their journey, they perpetrate, and also witness, flamboyant acts of colonial rage on black Mricans, acts whose raison d'être seems to be white self-reassurance. Impo- tent exhibitionists, in F anon's sense, these white intruders are at once predatory and fearful, constantly supplicating an as- sumed black "ragè' that they themselves constantly provoke. In a bar, Bobby, wear- ing a "nativè' shirt (but made in Holland), tries to pick up a black man, a Zulu. "If I come into the world again I want to come with your colour," Bobby says, and puts his hand on the Zulu's. The Zulu, with- out moving his hand or changing his ex- pression, spits in Bobby's face. At a de- crepit hotel, an old English colonel humiliates Peter, a black assistant, while his white visitors look on. One day, he warns Peter, you will come to my room to kill me, but "I'll be waiting. I'll say, 'It's Peter. Peter hates me.' And you won't come past that door. Tll kill you. I'll shoot you dead." The title novella shifts its per- spectives and allegiances, now white, now black, just as the whole collection does: in addition to Bobby and Lindà s journey in Mrica, there is the story of Santosh, the Bombay servant uprooted in Washington, D.C.; a story narrated by a West Indian immigrant trying desperately to survive in England; and two extracts from a repor- torial journal apparently kept by the au- thor. Naipaul's publisher wanted to dis- card everything but the novella. Naipaul, the breaker of forms, demurred, insisting h h h d ." " t at e a wrItten a sequence. Naipaul's sympathy for the political and emotional fragility of his characters did not extend, alas, to his wife. His bru- tally fulfilling affair with Margaret Good- ing-"I wished to possess her as soon as I saw her," he tells his biographer-gradu- ally voided a passionless marriage. In the mid-nineteen-seventies, husband and wife began to spend more and more time apart, as N aipaul travelled on ceaseless